Boston, she corresponded with him about every book and lesson, and revised his translations. From this period she accompanied his entire progress in culture, and to the last was the intimate friend of his thought. These three women, all refined and cultivated — representing the religious sensibility, the self-reliance, and the philosophical thought and scientific scholarship of the New England renaissance, so to say—had charge of the Emerson boys. Never were maternal Parcæ more triumphant. The annals of Harvard may be searched in vain to find more brilliant careers than those of several of these youths. It was even for a time doubtful which of them was to be "the coming man." Affectionate with each other, sympathetic in their studies and opinions, devoted to their mother and her two friends (of whom indeed any youths might have been proud), they were born free of the besetting vices of young men, while full of humour and enterprise.

The family, without being straitened in circumstances, had to observe strict eccnomy for the supreme object of education, and when the elder had graduated they taught school to pay the way of the younger through college. William was to have entered the ministry, and went to Germany to pursue his studies for that end. He there formed the acquaintance of Goethe, and studied German criticisms until his opinions became sceptical concerning Christianity, and he was compelled to disappoint his mother in his selection of a profession. He died a few years ago, after a successful career in New York as a barrister. It required a good deal of moral courage in the elder son to dis

appoint his mother and the eminent clergymen around her, who were looking forward to another William Emerson, to make good the promise of the brilliant father.

The third son, Edward Bliss, also studied law, and in the office of Daniel Webster; but lost his health in early life, and went to Porto Rico, where he died. "The Last Farewell," written by him in 1832, while sailing out of Boston harbour on the voyage from which he never returned, was printed in the first number of the Dial," and is included in "May Day, and other Poems," followed by Emerson's "In Memoriam." Robert Bulkeley was enfeebled by scarlet fever, and died in middle life.

Charles Chauncy died in 1836. This was a particularly heavy bereavement, not only to the family, but to a large circle of friends. He was betrothed to Elizabeth Hoar of Concord, then as afterwards an intimate and cherished friend of Emerson.

In the "Dial" some literary fragments left by Charles Emerson were published as "Notes from the Journal of a Scholar," preceded by lines from Persius

"Nunc non e manibus illis

Nunc non e tumulo, fortunataque favilla
Nascuntur violæ?"

Those who read these casual but most suggestive paragraphs concerning Homer, Shakespeare, Burke, will not wonder at the enthusiasm of his friends, which anticipated for him a brilliant career. Dr. Oliver Wendell

Holmes, who was his class-mate, wrote concerning Charles Emerson these beautiful lines:

"Thou calm, chaste scholar! I can see thee now,

The first young laurels on thy pallid brow;
O'er thy slight figure floating lightly down

In graceful folds the academic gown;

On thy curled lip the classic lines, that taught
How nice the mind that sculptured them with thought,
And triumph glistening in the clear blue eye,

Too bright to live, but oh, too fair to die!"

I quote a passage from Charles Emerson's journal, from which one may gather that he did not die, but was caught up into the spirit of the brother who mourned his loss so profoundly.

"This afternoon we read Shakespeare. The verse so sank into me, that as I toiled my way home under the cloud of night, with the gusty music of the storm around and overhead, I doubted that it was all a remembered scene; that humanity was indeed one, a spirit continually reproduced, accomplishing a vast orbit, whilst individual men are but the points through which it passes.

"We each of us furnish to the angel who stands in the sun a single observation. The reason why Homer is to me like dewy morning is because I too lived while Troy was, and sailed in the hollow ships of the Grecians to sack the devoted town. The rosy-fingered dawn as it crimsoned the top of Ida, the broad seashore dotted with tents, the Trojan hosts in their painted armour, and the rushing chariots of Diomed and Idomeneus all these too I saw; my ghost ani

mated the frame of some nameless Argive.

And

Shakespeare in King John' does but recall me to myself in the dress of another age, the sport of new accidents. I, who am Charles, was sometime Romeo. In Hamlet, I pondered and doubted. We forget what we have been, drugged with the sleepy bowl of the present; but when a lively chord in the soul is struck, when the windows for a moment are unbarred, the long and varied past is recovered. We recognise it all. We are no more brief, ignoble creatures; we seize our immortality, and bind together the related parts of our secular being."

It will be seen that the elemental Fates did but partially second the faithful and wise human Providences which had watched over these young men. It may partly have been the pain suffered in the loss of his brothers which taught Emerson his peculiar horror of ill-health, which he spoke of as a ghoul, and dreaded as the hermits did any sign of a demon invading their solitude It may also have been in part the love, wisdom, and character represented in his three FatesRuth, Sarah, Mary-which made him among the earliest to demand that the equality of woman with man should be represented in politics and the laws.

IV.

A BOSTON BOY.

HE later life of Emerson furnishes various fore

THE

grounds from which his early life may be seen in right perspective. That which I select is the great New Year's Day of 1863, which brought President Lincoln's proclamation of freedom to the American slaves, when Emerson read to a large assembly his noble Boston Hymn.

The proclamation found the people assembled in Boston and Emerson reading to them his Hymn:

"The word of the Lord by night
To the watching Pilgrims came
As they sat by the seaside,

And filled their hearts with flame.

"God said, I am tired of kings,

I suffer them no more;

Up to my ear the morning brings
The outrage of the poor."

So it opened, and through the twenty-two verses, so full of majesty, the vast audience listened with hearts aflame.

What a vista was visible behind that scholar who